Saturday, 14 May 2011

Today was one of those extraordinarily rare days that just don't happen. I'm having my final exams this and the next week and today I was writing algebra. The test lasts 3 hours and is devised into 4 sectors of escalating difficulty. So here's what happened.

1 hour has passed since the test began and I have already solved Ύ of the test. Now, with 2 whole hours left I was focusing on that annoying as fuck sub-question of the second section. At first I thought “What the hell, I have 2 hours, I can do this”, but as time went by and I literally had no fucking clue whatsoever on how to solve this, stress kicked in giving way to a minor panic attack.(At this point I know this sounds a bit like overreacting but trust me, where I live, these exams are the alpha and omega. It's like 18 years of preparation just to achieve a high score in these exams). Minutes later, I was desperate. Clock started racing, my mind was empty and I had 2 full A4 pages filled with whatever junk popped in my head.

5 minutes before the bell rings, I decide to write all that junk to the clean paper and hope to get even a point for something remotely related. And then something magic happened. As I was letting my pen down, literally seconds before the bell, it all became clear. I wrote down the answers and left with a big ass smile on my face... Unbelievable.

Friday, 13 May 2011

It's been roughly two years since the last day I played WoW. In those two years I decided to take my studies a bit more serious and focus on getting shit done instead of wasting 12 hours a day farming epics. This year though, my final year, me and a bunch of friends who used to play with me decided to give it another try. That was at the beginning of the year. Now, almost near summer, we are getting ready to start again. All throughout the year I've been so hyped about starting WoW once again – or at least, that's what I thought.

Truth is, about two months ago I was given the chance to participate in the closed beta of Rift. I followed all the beta releases up to the open beta and hours before launch, I found my self ready to per-order. And that I did. “What the hell”, I thought. I'll just play for a couple of hours everyday till I'm done with my exams and then dive back in to WoW. But that's hardly what happened. In reality, it turned out that Rift has the exact same mechanisms that WoW has, after all – as some might say – it's a WoW clone.

With some effort, I managed to get off Rift after a month and a half and now, done with my exams, I'm ready to start WoW. But am I really? To be honest, the hype that I used to have throughout the year, is now completely gone. You see, those two years of absence, I was still following updates through Youtube videos and I know pretty much what's happening right now. The same thing that was happening two years ago. Not a single thing has changed. Besides some new fancy dungeons and maybe a map extension the rest are still the same and I have literally no desire to start doing the same thing over and over again.

I don't know maybe I just got bored of it. But I know it's not just me. I know people from Rift who just quit WoW to try something new because it had become unbearably repeatable. Seriously, 6 years (ok maybe the first two weren't so bad but still) of doing the same thing over and over? Hell, it's about time. I also know major reviewers who used to roll out videos with fresh content every day. Now they are making videos once a week or moved to reviewing other games(Rift, Minecraft, Portal 2 for as long as it lasts)

And I won't go to say the stereotype “Unless blizzard makes something new, I'm quitting”. Because I know they won't. To tell you the truth, I think they have already realized it's over and are moving on. I've already quit. WoW has hardly had any new players for at least a year. And most of them quit before they hit 85. All that's left now is people with an endless list of achievements and enough gear to solo -shit I don't even know what- who just refuse to let those go. And it's totally normal. But in the end, those people will leave too.